


For the First Time All Over Again

by KrisseyCrystal (AisukuriMuStudio)



Category: The Legend of Zelda & Related Fandoms, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Genre: Drabble, Introspective Shit which I am Here For, Light Angst, Link the Local Amnesiac, Pre-Memories, That's all it is just drabbles, and being like oh, and taking note of the world 100-years-post-Calamity, basically just Link wandering around right after he's finally gotten his paraglider, devotion doesn't come overnight, so this is the world i once knew
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-09
Updated: 2018-08-09
Packaged: 2019-06-24 10:12:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15628482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AisukuriMuStudio/pseuds/KrisseyCrystal
Summary: Link leaves the Great Plateau armed with a new paraglider, some makeshift weapons and shields, and a whole lot more questions than answers.Good thing he's got a lot of time to think on the road.





	For the First Time All Over Again

He doesn’t think about it until he walks through Outpost Ruins.

When he sees the two halves of what was once someone’s bed in a small, gaping open rectangular room in the middle of an eastbound and overgrown road--that’s when it registers.

The Calamity was real.

People died.

(Supposedly, he almost did.)

Sure, Link remembers what King Rhoam said. He knows his duty; he knows what he is here to accomplish. The slate bouncing against his thigh reminds him every time he breathes.

But all of that--a history of a terrible Calamity wrought one hundred years ago--doesn’t feel _real_ until he sees what should have been a safe place for someone to lay their head broken and splintered, left to rot.

For not the last time, he wonders:  why him?

* * *

It’s not that Link isn’t committed.

He assures Impa of that, jaw set and shoulders pulled back. He doesn’t blink when he answers her and says he is ready to give his life for this. And sure, maybe there’s a little bit of faking it:  this conviction in his heart until he himself believes it well enough that he convinces her to believe _him_. But he means it, or he knows he’ll mean it.

He just doesn’t _remember_.

(That makes this whole mission harder to swallow down and toughen through than he’d like to admit.)

He’s been told, twice now, what happened 100 years ago, but nothing sounds familiar. As far as he knows it, his life has started with his name and a frenzied dash forward into a green, green world he’s since fought in and fallen for. But he knows nothing of this ‘knight’ he had been. Knows nothing of his post he once held as captain of Princess Zelda’s guard.

Sometimes, when the stars are his only company, he questions all the hope an entire _kingdom_ placed upon him, when he isn’t even able to remember them.

He should love who he fights for, right?

Why him?

* * *

Link thinks a lot about love in the days that follow.

(Not just because he has horses now to tend to and care for.)

* * *

Link reaches Hateno Village and meets Teebo and something in him changes.

The small bundle of breathless excitement, topped with a sleek and dark mat of black hair, runs in circles at every turn as he tries to lead Link to “what he’s just found.” He’s a huffing, red-faced, bespectacled _mess_ and when he suddenly stops in the middle of their mad dash through the hills because he’s “tired” and “is going to go home now,” Link laughs and absolutely falls for the kid.

(He doesn’t love so much the obsidian horned statue the kid finally shows him the next day, but that’s beside the point.)

It’s the tiniest of shifts. It’s the smallest of differences.

Link starts to think that maybe he doesn’t need to love Hyrule the same way his hundred-years-ago self did. Maybe it’s okay to fall in love with the land and its people for the first time all over again.

* * *

Hungrily, he reads Purah’s diary.

He pours over her pages like a man starved. His fingers, rough and hilt-leather toughened, trace the gentle curve of her words, the slant of her writing. Her memories paint a dearer and clearer picture of just who he was to these people:  to the people who loved him and who he must have loved in return.

(Love. Love.)

Maybe, Link thinks, it isn't him who should be the one who gets to answer why him.

**Author's Note:**

> Just a series of soft drabbles because I can't help myself apparently. May write more the further into the game I get but this is still pretty early stuff. 
> 
> I'm a slowpoke with these kinds of things.


End file.
